Cyberspunk 2069 Bk. 02

"Who says I want to sell? Dey good meat, still warm and fleshy," his eyes narrowed.

"$12,000 each." Lane didn't blink. Where the hell was this money coming from? I knew I couldn't ask her right then, or I'd blow whatever game she was playing. But I also didn't know if it was a game I wanted to be part of. My guess, at that point, was that I was there as her muscle, more so than her branding pitch. But if that Roid Droid or the others decided they wanted to turn us into toys too, I didn't think there'd be much I could do to stop them.

"You strange one, girlie - but okay," Dunder held out his chrome-tipped fingers, and Lane took his hand. More than a handshake, it was a transferring of funds, and the $24,000 entered a neutral holding between accounts until closure of the deal was confirmed. To that end, Dunder led us to the last two crates in the row, and began unlatching them. One girl was Indian, the other some kind of Native American, and both were rail-thin with frizzy black hair. Dunder dragged them from their little round beds onto the dusty floor before us.

Without a word, Lane knelt and scooped the Indian girl's arm around her shoulder, smearing her knitted dress with the cum from Dunder's "supper" bath. I followed her lead and started lifting the Native girl, who groaned tiredly in my arms. I scooped her legs up so that I was cradling her, and shifted my grip while I waited to see what came next. Lane was supporting the Indian girl's weight and turned back to Dunder.

"I want some coverings for them, too," her brown-disc eyes were expressionless. Dunder grinned his metallic maw.

"Pets don't wear clodes." He waved his hand around at the bevy of nude girls getting plugged and pummeled around the warehouse space.

"You've got some around here, from new arrivals, I'm sure."

Dunder thought for a second, held up a finger, and disappeared. I used my knee to lift the Native girl up again, as the cum on her legs caused her to keep sliding down my fingers. When the borg leader returned, he was holding a dirty white bathrobe, and a pink kimono that looked way too big for any of the Pets I saw in the building. Lane waited until we got the girls outside to the van to dress them, and then we laid them down in the back on some piles of garment cloth for the return trip to the store.

***

"That kimono belongs to my friend... well, a wrestler I know," I was sitting in the passenger seat while Lane navigated the highway back North.

"I know. Allie Sun." She said, as if it was obvious.

"You know her?"

"I know of her."

"Did you know she was there? Was she there?"

"No. And not for long, if at all. She traded hands pretty quickly."

I frowned. "Why do you know all this? What are you gonna do with these girls?" Lane was quiet, thinking. I wasn't sure she'd answer, but just before I asked again, she did.

"There are dens like that all over. I visit them sometimes, try to get the girls in bad shape out when I can."

"And, what about the others?" More quiet from the driver seat. I looked over at her face, illuminated by the opposite flow of traffic.

"They'll be free too, eventually."

Free, she said. She'd just purchased two of them. And they'd probably end up working in her shop, where they'd still be naked display racks with customer service jobs. My head hurt, everything was starting to feel kind of complicated and hopeless. We bounced along the highway for a while, and Lane eventually took an exit past the one where her store was located.

"Where are we going?" I asked.

"My house. I want to show you something."

We drove along a service road outside a couple of huge, empty warehouses, and I thought she was taking me to another den. Then she turned left at the end of the road near a smaller warehouse, and we were in the cul de sac of a little residential neighborhood. Lots of the houses were run down with overgrown lawns, and some had sun-bleached "FOR SALE" signs in the yard.

The driveway we pulled into led up to a small, long house with a red-shingled roof and a metal front door. Lane turned off the van, got out, and started waking our passenger cargo. We helped them to the door, where Lane knocked a few times in a sequence, and a sharp-nosed white girl with a long, rust-colored ponytail answered.

"Hey, Lane," the girl said, stepping aside in her baggy sweats so we could enter. She looked at me, and the girls we were carrying, but didn't seem surprised.

"Teri, can you get these two some probiotic shakes?" Lane asked, easing the Indian girl onto a black chaise in the front room. The inside of the house was incredibly modest, considering it supposedly belonged to Lane. It had an early-2000s style, with beige walls and fake granite countertops that I could see through the cutout in the kitchen wall. Teri walked by it on her way to the fridge, and I set the Native girl down on a puffy armchair in the corner.

"I've got it from here," Teri said when she returned, and Lane led me to the back of the house. There were four bedrooms between the front and back of the little building, and a rear porch that led out into some trees. A couple of bedroom doors were closed, and two were open. We entered the last one, but before we did I saw a couple of other girls talking beside a computer screen next to some bunk beds.

"Have a seat," Lane said, closing the door behind us and slipping out of her jizz-stained dress. I looked around and sat on a long, padded bench against the wall, while Lane walked over to a small closet and clicked the light on overhead. She was naked under the dress, and didn't try to hide as she changed into a silky chemise, lit by a single bulb dangling overhead. She had slender, graceful limbs, with tattoos swirling up her torso from her hips. They emanated from her shaved pussy, and crawled up between her small, pert breasts like smoke - gray and blue, the colors I imagined an ice dragon's breath might be. There were some scars on her back, and I got another glimpse of the birdcage and Latin ink on her upper arms.

"Lane. What's going on?" I asked calmly as she turned off the closet light and sat cross-legged on a floor cushion opposite me. She took a slow breath in, and out, looking at her hands in her lap for a moment.

"There are... a lot of ways, that someone can be owned." She said finally. I didn't rush her thought process. "The obvious ones you see every day. On the corners. At the malls. But, those are just symptoms."

"Symptoms?" My voice was quiet.

"It's like... If there's a poisonous weed in your garden, you can pluck the weed, and things will be better, for a while. But it'll come back. It still exists - in the roots, down there in the dirt." She shifted on her cushion, looking up at me. "That doesn't mean you shouldn't pluck the weed, or that you should give up on the garden. But you need more tools, to dig the roots out."

"Lane... I'm not following." I pursed my lips empathetically.

"What you saw today, and over the past few weeks - I've been plucking weeds. But, the roots are still hard to reach. They're up in penthouse offices, and locked behind boardroom doors, and driving around in bulletproof black trucks. I can't reach the roots - not yet. But I can pluck the poison weeds, or at least get people away from them."

"So... that warehouse today, that was a poison weed?"

Lane nodded. "Those mod-addicts... they get so chromed up they forget how to be human. They start preying on anyone weaker than them, anyone that looks different, anyone without protection. They jack themselves up with all kinds of illegal parts, and go around snatching people - women - even without an official SexCorp bill of sale."

So not all of those girls were even legitimate Pets. And I'd heard of illegal mods, but never seen any myself. Until then.

"So, Dunder..." I looked at Lane, and she nodded.

"Chock full of black market parts." That explained his unending cum streams, and those bizarre, inverted eyes.

"He had Allie's kimono. Do you think Brawnswick...?"

"Has illegal mods? Almost definitely. And they'd be hard to detect. Den fixers are small-minded, evil bastards, but they're crafty."

That motherfucker. I knew he was too big - too superhuman - to only be Borg-7. He had to be 80% synthetic, at least. And the league docs wouldn't even be able to officially tell.

"That means he cheated in the match with Allie. We have to tell the commission - he can't own her if he cheated, if he committed a crime," I was starting to feel that old, familiar heat in my blood.

"The commission? The one sponsored by SexCorp? The one that provides billions in entertainment revenue to their holders every quarter?" Lane cupped her hands in her lap.

"But... the contract is... it's void if..."

"Mia," those cool brown discs searched my face. "We can't help Allie. Not yet. Even if the commission believed you, and someone on the upper rungs wanted to nullify the contract - she'd just be sold to someone else. SexCorp owns the country. They own the banks. They own me and you. We don't have to have collars on for that to be true. And they don't have to admit, or rectify, their mistakes. So they don't. They never will."

"Then... then what the fuck do we do?? Go buy her, like we did the girls out there?" I flung a hand at the closed door leading to the main house.

"No. Allie isn't just a cum dump to him. She's a trophy. He won't let her go willingly. And trying anything direct will just make him hold on tighter. Or worse."

I didn't want to ask about the "or worse" part. I started bouncing my heel as an inadequate anger vent.

"SexCorp didn't invent the idea of Pets. But they made it legal, acceptable, common. If they weren't selling them, somebody else would be. My people - the ones I work with - we're trying to make it very clear, on an unprecedented scale, that involuntary servitude is a bad fucking idea."

"No shit it's a bad idea, but clearly nobody fucking cares."

"Many do. And more will. Like I said, you need tools to reach the roots of a weed."

"So you're, what - some kind of fucking glorious revolutionary? A secret agent freedom fighter saving the world one Pet at a time?" My voice was growing harsh. I could feel myself lashing out, but couldn't help it.

"No," Lane smiled, fingering the Latin text on her arm and looking out the window. "I'm just an artist. But, there's always some overlap."

*****

Book 3 tests the bond between Mia and Manny as the league, and the country, seek to tear them apart. Through an unexpected odyssey down the coast, Mia discovers an unexplored side of herself, for better or for worse. The heat is rising. The gloves are coming off. And so are the masks of those who hold the strings.